To Relish the Sublime?: Culture and Self-Realization in Postmodern Times

More than 130 years from Matthew Arnold’s pronouncement that human beings ‘must be compelled to relish the sublime’, education in the humanities still relies on the ideal of culture as the means of intellectual development. In this distinctive and original work, Martin Ryle and Kate Soper explore the growing tensions and contradictions between this and the contemporary world of work, pleasure, and consumption. While critical of the hypocrisies and elitism that can attach to notions of cultu...